Sensitive information in electronic devices is usually protected using various encryption methods. Even though encryption protects the primary channels of the device from hackers, several secondary channels are still prone to attacks.
Side channel attacks are aimed to gain information from the device by targeting these secondary channels of the device like the hardware, timing information, electromagnetic radiation, without limitation. Typical side channel attacks can include: attacking the cache implemented by monitoring the cache; timing attacks implemented by measuring the computation timing of different tasks; power monitoring attacks implemented by measuring the varying nature of device power consumption; electromagnetic attacks implemented by measuring electromagnetic radiation leaked from the device; fault injection attacks implemented by placing the device in abnormal conditions such as abruptly raising or lowering power supply voltage: and/or tampering with the clock, device temperature, without limitation.
Side channel attacks involving power supplies of the device come under the category of fault injection. Glitching the supply voltage (higher or lower) may affect the device in certain ways, some of which include changes to the logic outputs of the circuits affecting further control operations, affecting the on-going device operations like programming/reading from a memory location, without limitation, essentially leaving the device corrupted.
In view of the availability of these power supply side channel hacking procedures, there is a long standing need for the device to be capable of detecting such power supply attacks and take preventive actions against these attacks.